Good morning! Editor Nicole MacAdam (@nicole_mac1) here with your morning soupçon of business news, including how a late-night deal between Aurora and CanniMed sets the stage for a clash of the cannabis titans.

Framing the free trade debate

The commitment of Unifor president Jerry Dias and Flavio Volpe, head of the Automobile Manufacturer’s Association to the gruelling NAFTA negotiation process is paying off

, writes columnist Kevin Carmichael. They are omnipresent in the coverage of the talks because they are intelligent, earnest, quotable, and, above all, present. I have no idea how much sway they have over the negotiators, but Dias and Volpe have achieved outsized influence over the way the trade debate is framed by the press. There is nothing evil about that; it’s the way the game is played. It does matter, though, when the leading sources for perspective on trade are leaders of special-interest groups. We end up talking only about the potential losers, and not at all about why Canada and so many other countries embraced freer trade in the first place.

Parts industry divided on TPP

While representatives of the auto industry were quick to criticize the government’s decision to sign the revised TPP, Linda Hasenfratz, CEO of Linamar, Canada’s second-largest parts manufacturer has come out in support of the trade deal, which she said “simply creates more opportunities for growth.”

Bottom line: John Holmes, a Queen’s University professor who studied how the original TPP agreement would impact the Canadian auto industry, said auto parts producers with an extensive global footprint such as Linamar, Magna International Inc. and Martinrea International Inc. stand to benefit from the new deal, writes Alicja Siekierska. But smaller companies without a global footprint are vulnerable, he said.

Indigenous leaders fight tanker ban

First Nations leaders behind the proposed $16-billion Eagle Spirit pipeline project from Alberta to the British Columbia coast launched a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for a court challenge to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s oil tanker ban on the north west coast, reports Claudia Cattaneo.

Bottom line: The project’s chiefs council said the tanker moratorium and the establishment Great Bear Rainforest “were promoted largely through the lobbying of foreign-financed ENGOs and without the consultation and consent of First Nations as required by the Constitution.” The chiefs said they will always put protection of the environment first, but it must be balanced with social welfare, employment, and business opportunities.

Aurora poised to take on Canopy

The $1 billion-plus takeover of CanniMed Therapeutics is the largest M&A move to date in the fast-growing cannabis sector and sets the stage for Aurora to challenge Canopy Growth for the industry’s top spot, writes Mark Rendell.

Bottom line: The agreement comes after the companies spent the better part of two months trading blows and recriminations. Last week a CanniMed shareholder approached Aurora and managed to bring the antagonists to the negotiating table, said Cam Battley, Aurora’s chief corporate officer.

Quote: “We literally did not finish this thing until (Wednesday) morning. Nobody got any sleep (on Tuesday) night and that’s been pretty much par for the course for the last week,” Battley said.

HQ2 could be bad for home owners

A capacity-constrained city with a perennial shortage of affordable housing and limited transport capacity, Toronto may be courting trouble by pursuing Amazon’s HQ2, write Murtaza Haider and Stephen Moranis. The tech giant has said its second headquarters will employ 50,000 high-earners with an average salary of US$100,000. It will also require 8 million square feet (SFT) of office and commercial space. Those highly paid workers will be competing for residential real estate with Toronto residents whose individual median income in 2015 was just $30,089. It may still make sense to woo Amazon, but the city should at the very least create contingency plans to address the resulting infrastructure deficit (not just public transit) and housing affordability issues before it throws open its doors.